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What Happened to the Buckyball?
It Seems to Be Landing With a Thud

By

Susan Warren Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Updated May 4, 1998 12:01 a.m. ET

From the moment the buckyball bounced onto the scene in 1985, it dazzled scientists with its perfect symmetry, sensational curves and alluring hollow core. Looking just like a soccer ball, the microscopic bundle of 60 atoms represented a startling new form of carbon -- the building block of life. Physicists, chemists and materials scientists foresaw a vast universe of lucrative commercial uses, from finely tuned pharmaceuticals to broad-based industrial applications.

But today the buckyball is landing with a thud. While it won the hearts of scientists and a Nobel prize in chemistry for the three scientists at Rice University who discovered it, nobody has found a workable commercial use. Labs at
Lucent Technologies Inc.
and
DuPont Co.
have turned to other things, and companies that set up shop to churn out what they hoped would be tons of buckyballs instead sell less than a pound a month -- all for research.

"Bucky doesn't have a job yet," co-discoverer Richard Smalley says. And he adds paternally, "We do wring our hands a little bit worrying it may never happen."

Lots of Promise

For many scientists -- and industry in general -- that is a letdown. Buckyballs looked like a milestone in industry because they represented the first molecule built out of carbon. Formally dubbed fullerenes (after Buckminster Fuller, architect of the geodesic domes that buckyballs resemble) they promised scientists a chance to manipulate carbon materials as never before.

That is because carbons like diamonds and graphite, which are lattice-works of single atoms, can't be dissolved into liquids. Buckyballs can. Since buckyballs are a stable molecule, scientists can build them up Lego-style by tacking on additional atoms or molecules.

"We thought there was going to be a huge market," says Robert Wong, who launched SES Research in Houston in 1992 to make and sell buckyballs. His company, which started out with about 300 buckyball customers, now has about 100, and he and his staff of five are switching their focus to engineering consulting, though they still make buckyballs.

Tracing the rise and fall of buckyballs offers a view of the hurdles a discovery must leap to make it to the marketplace. First of all, to be a commercial success, a new material must do something better or more cheaply than anything else.

Catch-22 Situation

But that leads to the old chicken-and-egg problem. Without a major industrial use, there is no incentive to spend lots of money figuring out how to make buckyballs cost less. But unless they cost less, they can't seem to find a commercial use.

Consider the experience of Bell Labs, now a unit of Lucent. It has been trying for years to find "superconducting" materials that can conduct electricity without energy loss at near room temperatures. (While some materials become superconducting when they are supercooled, that is an expensive and complicated process.)

In 1991, Robert Haddon, then a chemist at the lab, theorized that by inserting metal atoms between buckyballs -- imagine putting a tennis ball in the space created by the conjunction of four basketballs -- the molecules could become a promising superconductive material.

Early experiments showed he was right. Buckyballs alone don't conduct electricity. But when scientists heated metal atoms and buckyballs together, they found the spare atoms fell naturally into the spaces between balls. The result: an intriguing new metal that could conduct electricity.

During the next year, the Bell scientists experimented with the compound to test its superconducting boundaries. Very quickly, they found that the buckyball material became superconductive at higher temperatures than they expected. Unfortunately, other materials, such as copper oxide, proved to be better.

'Nothing Useful'

Despite three more years of work, Bell Labs never got buckyballs to perform better than other current superconducting materials. "In this case, we got out some great science, and nothing useful," says Don Murphy, head of applied materials research at the lab.

At other companies, some scientists envisioned the buckyball as a microscopic ball-bearing and experimented with its lubricating ability. They figured that because buckyballs are microscopic balls, a bunch of them together would act like ball bearings. They played with the idea of putting them into fine machinery, like watches, or as a motor oil additive. But existing lubricants -- graphite powder, for instance -- proved to do the job as well and more cheaply.

At DuPont, Gerry Lavin, a senior scientist in the company's research labs, worked on a process that would exploit buckyballs' antioxidant qualities-their ability to vacuum up "free radicals," which are left over from various chemical processes. Over time, the free radicals can form a residue that gunks up equipment and impairs its function.

The scientists knew the 60 carbon atoms making up the buckyball produce a kind of electron cloud around the ball. Free radicals, meanwhile, have a spare electron just looking to connect with another electron. So "when a free radical sees a buckyball, it's like a stickyball. It grabs it and can't let go," Mr. Lavin says.

That quality got DuPont scientists thinking that buckyballs could be added to industrial chemical processes that normally produce lots of free radicals. Unfortunately, because buckyballs are still expensive to produce, they didn't bring any cost savings.

Price per Pound

Though prices have dropped over the years, buckyballs, which form a gritty, brownish yellow powder when gathered by the billions, still cost from $25 to $200 a gram, depending on their purity. That's something like $11,000 or more a pound. For any commercially viable product, buckyballs need to cost well under $100 a pound. And for industrial uses such as those DuPont envisioned, the price would need to be more like $10, Mr. Lavin says.

Some think the best potential for buckyballs remains in medicine. Insert the right atom or tack on the right molecule, the theory goes, and they can become a carrier pigeon for a new drug. But so far, researchers haven't gotten far enough to know how well that works.

It may be too early to drop the buckyball altogether. Decades can pass before a commercial use is found for some new materials. "Nuclear magnetic resonance was strictly a scientific curiosity for decades, and now it's one of the biggest things in medicine," says Donald Huffman, physics professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, who in 1990 found a way to actually make microscopic buckyballs so that scientists could begin studying them.

But for now, buckyballs are something of a poster child for the scientific world. Disney sells buckyball models at its Epcot Center in Orlando, Fla., and teachers take soccer balls to class to teach children about molecules, encouraging them to imagine each vertex as a carbon atom.

"It was a great class," says Mildred Dresselhaus, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who worked with third graders recently. "Now they know a lot more about the soccer ball they kick around."